Imagined Places: A Life in the Twentieth Century

By Reginald Foakes

In the twentieth century new modes of fast and cheap transport, especially the ocean liner, the car and the airplane, have transformed our way of life. The new mobility has made it possible for people to commute vast distances and move freely between places and countries to work and make a living. This book is concerned with the way Imagined Places in many parts of the world, as reconstructed in the memory, anchor the experiences that seem to shape the meaning of a life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 28, 2005
• ISBN: 9781462839100

Reginald Foakes

The author, Reg Foakes, was born in England, but has lived many years in the United States, where he has enjoyed a career as a university teacher, editor, and writer of literary criticism. He does not have much sympathy with the current fashion for verse that is virtually indistinguishable from prose, and prefers mainly to work with stanza forms, regular lines and sometimes rhyme. As Ezra Pound wrote, “Poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music”

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Imagined Places

A Life in the Twentieth Century

Reginald Foakes

Copyright © 2005 by Reginald Foakes.

Library of Congress Number:                     2005905488

ISBN :         Hardcover                               1-4134-9915-5

                   Softcover                                 1-4134-9914-7

                   Ebook                                      9781462839100

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This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

Part One

1   

2

3   

4   

5

6   

7   

8   

9   

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

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18

19

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21

22

23

24

25

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27

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29

Part Two

1   

2   

3   

4   

5   

6   

7   

8   

9   

10

11

12

13

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16

Part One

Tramlines and Slagheaps

Long, long ago, when I was only four,

Going towards my grandmother, the line

Passed through a coalfield. From the corridor

I watched it pass with envy, thought "How fine!

Oh, how I wish that situation mine."

Tramlines and slagheaps, pieces of machinery,

That was, and still is, my ideal scenery.

(W.H. Auden, Letter to Lord Byron,

Part 2, in Letters from Iceland, 1937)

1   

Tulips

It is a mild spring day and I have been left for the moment to my own devices on a patch of grass in the back garden. There is a tempting hole in the hedge that separates the garden of our home from the house of our neighbour to the north, and I crawl through, heading for her tulips. They stand tall in two rows, and their cups, a brilliant orange-red, are opening to the warmth of the sun. I seek a close encounter with their fiery brilliance, and bend one so that I can look directly into the golden secrets clasped inside the petals, filament, anther and stigma, and I am overwhelmed by what I see, by the way the red in the petals merges at the bottom of the cup into a yellow-orange that glows as if from internal illumination, throwing up streaks as sunspots do. Then I begin to break off flower-heads, and I am gripping a bunch in my small hands when Miss Barclay comes rolling down the slope of her garden and yanks me with some violence back towards the hedge.

Miss Barclay’s name I came to know later. If she had a Christian name it had evaporated long ago, and her identity became fixed for me as a retired headmistress with a vast experience of making life miserable for small children. In appearance she was round and grey, grey-haired, and grey-clothed, and generally sour, like her breath as she now huffed at my face. She shakes me, causing me to yell, so that my father comes running from our house to confront my formidable antagonist across the hedge. Dad could, like many small men (he was five feet four inches tall), be aggressive, but on this occasion he wisely holds his peace. The two heads face one another, and I imagine one shouting and bobbing, with hands and arms gesticulating apparently independently, unattached to a body, the other perfectly silent and still, farce and tragedy at once.

You see what this child of yours has done? This little monster has wrecked my tulip bed, and I’d have you know I was expecting to win a prize for them—the time and work I’ve put into them…

She pushes me back over the hedge, and explodes in a kind of massive snorting spraying me with spittle, and causing me to yell even louder. My father grabs me, muttering there, there, and reduces me to quiet sobbing as she carries on.

I expect you to punish him severely. And it’s time you repaired this gap in the hedge, it’s your responsibility. If you don’t do something about it at once I shall consult my solicitor. This really is the limit.

If she could have stomped away, she would have done so, but her legs were not long enough to create the desired effect. She turns her back on us and rolls on up to her house. Dad stands still, watching her, then mutters silly old cow, and leads his now quiet son back to his own door, where mum stands anxiously watching. She yanks him somewhat brusquely into the house.

What has he been up to this time, Will?

O, he’s broken off the heads of some of Lady Barclay’s tulips, that’s all.

This one’s a destructive little devil, and I can’t watch him all the time.

Well, Fanny, perhaps he just likes flowers, and I’m sure he gets more pleasure out of them than that old bag next door ever does—she doesn’t know what pleasure is. Anyway, I’ll block up that hole in the hedge—I’ve been meaning to for some time.

Whatever shall we do with you, you little tinker?

So mother crooned, but in fact she knew quite well what she was going to do immediately with her two-and-a half-year-old son, which was to hand him over to her neighbours on the south side, and leave him and his elder brother with them while she walked to the shops, pushing her baby asleep in the pram.

What really happened that day was something else, never to be reconstituted. The meaning, some of the possible meanings, may be recovered or reinvented, but not the experience. Memory is too skittish, and more concerned to preserve the self than to reveal the events as they took place in all their crudeness and unanticipated eruption out of nowhere. Looking back, it seems as if memory acts as a register of moments that should have significance. Those trivial incidents that stand out inexplicably from the undifferentiated continuum of past time appear to have importance, even if the meaning in such cases remains out of reach. But it may be truer to say that memory constructs the events of the past, and the people involved. So I may remember a significance and rememorize the memory to reconstruct the experience, or make it conform to the experience as I want to remember it. Even that I can do only so far as words allow, words that slip and slide, that embroider and change the memory and the meaning even as they are written down. This account is a kind of biofiction, the first part of it an imaginative construct that registers something of what it was like to grow up in the industrial midlands of England in the period between World War 1 and World War 2.

Of course I could not possibly have remembered the affair of the tulips as I have described it. My younger brother Peter once recounted to me his earliest memory: he recalls crawling through a gap in the hedge between our house and Miss Barclay’s, and admiring her flowers Being a genial and kindly person, she came out to see what he was doing, and was so pleased to find him happily enjoying them, that she gave him sweets, took him under her wing, and made a favourite of him from that time on. It seems as though our perceptions of the flowers and of the character of Miss Barclay shaped the event; and perhaps we both only remember it as it was reconstructed in conversation, and embroidered in frequent repetitions for the benefit of our parents’ friends and neighbours. Memory may falsify and transform what really happened, but it registers exposure to happenings that remain available for recall and appear to demand interpretation. Memories provide the possibility of understanding something of the inner self, how convictions, emotional attachments, principles if any, and ideologies are acquired. Not that the significance is always recoverable; often it seems as if images remembered are like camera shots for which a vital clue is missing, something just outside the frame that would clarify everything, if only it could be salvaged. Usually, too, the location is vitally important, not the place as it was, which is beyond recovery, but the place as imagined in recall. It may be only much later that it becomes possible even to name the components of a remembered scene—petals, anther, stigma indeed, when at the time I could not even name a tulip. That may be when imagination takes over, as in the anecdote of these flowers; yet something is stubbornly there in my memory, a moment of excitement, staring into the heart of some mystery. Perhaps it was both my first act of vandalism, and my first consciousness of beauty.

2   

Home

Such experiences have meaning in relation to the mundane continuum of life in the setting that formed the background of each day’s routines, and seemed to belong out of time because it was there every day in childhood, a childhood of the late 1920s and 1930s before life was radically changed and speeded up by the conveniences and technology we now take for granted. Home was a semi-detached house built of pale red brick that my parents rented on the edge of a council estate known as Tantany in an industrial town, West Bromwich, located in the midlands of England at the edge of the Black Country, so-called because of its smoky heavy industry based on coal and steel. Tantany was named after a worked-out coalmine, and the houses had been built for rental by the local authority after World War 1 as a kind of new model estate, advertised as Homes for Heroes, meaning ex-servicemen. Few cars had occasion to pass along its streets, and the clip-clop of the horses and carts driven by the milkman, greengrocer and baker provided familiar daily noise.

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At the rear, to the east, our house faced across a long narrow garden to similar houses in a parallel street, while the front overlooked a wide expanse of playing fields. A central front door was flanked by two large sash windows, and above these three evenly spaced smaller windows marked the rooms in the upper floor. Approaching the house from the wicket-gate that opened from the street, we passed a narrow front garden, mainly lawn, with flower beds by the wall of the house. The window to the left of the front door lit the living room, which extended through the house, and had a smaller window overlooking the garden at the rear. The window to the right marked a little parlour, always known as the front room, that was used on special occasions, or to welcome important visitors, as when the vicar came to tea, and it had a mystique, the aura of a special place. It was not actually out of bounds to my brothers and me as children, but we rarely strayed into it. A gramophone was kept there, where I first listened to the modest selection of records we possessed, which included Amelita Galli-Curci, the coloratura soprano, singing Caro nome and Ah, fors e lui che l’anima, words mysterious but moving, and other arias sung by Caruso, as well as performances by Jascha Heifetz the great violinist, and popular songs by music-hall artists like George Robey.

Perhaps because of the special aura of this room one image from it stays in the memory, a largish painting or reproduction in a gold frame that hung on the wall opposite the window. It was a landscape of flowery meadows rising gently at first, then more steeply, towards a lofty range of mountains, blue, remote, barren, unscaleable. Under a sunny sky a small girl, accompanied by a woman who could be her sister or mother, walks towards the viewer—or is she walking away, to lose herself in that infinite? The absence of any other people or buildings in a vast space is puzzling. She has been picking flowers, but for whom? There are no houses in sight, and the two figures could have come from some sublime origin in the far hills, or could be escaping from something dreadful in the peopled world of daily life. Why is it that memory cannot be certain whether they are facing the mountains or the viewer? The girl wears a simple white dress tied with a coloured sash round the waist; she is cared for, and the flowers promise no harm, yet the whole effect is at once fascinating and deeply disturbing. Is it because these were the only mountains I experienced as a child? There were other pictures in the house, including reproductions of Franz Hals’ The Laughing Cavalier and When did you last see your father?, the once very popular historical genre painting by William Frederick Yeames of an aristocratic boy being grilled by a Commonwealth inquisitor in the seventeenth century; but none of them affected me like the one in the front room.

The large living-room doubled as a dining room, and provided playing spaces when my brothers and I were confined indoors; it was where we ate, where we did most things, warmed in winter by a coal fire. Lacking the gadgets children have today, game boys, CD players, etc., we played simple games, and were expected to share toys. It seemed everyone, except my parents, smoked then, and each pack of cigarettes contained a picture card. These provided us with a popular game, flicking a card with the aim of landing one on top of another, in rehearsals for competition in the school playground. Alternatively we might roll glass marbles with their whorls and spirals of colour embedded in them against the fender, practising for serious engagements with other boys in the street gutter, where if I was lucky or skilful enough to score a hit, that marble became mine. Opposite the fire stood an oak sideboard with a space underneath where I liked to set up my model railway, a simple oval, but a treasured Christmas present, with a clockwork engine pulling a couple of carriages round and round. An old glass biscuit barrel which I associate with digestive biscuits rested on the dresser; it had a silver-plated lid, with a kneeling rifleman in the centre as a handle. The barrel of his gun had been broken off, but an arch for lifting the lid was made like a strap and supported by two complete rifles. I don’t think I noticed the incongruity between rifles and biscuits. This image, drawn from fighting (possibly in the Boer War?), became connected with ideas of the First World War, which cast a deep shadow over our lives.

The house throughout had gas lighting at first, with a circular fitting in the main living room. Electric lighting came later, and made it possible for us to have a proper radio, so that we could listen to the BBC’s Children’s Hour. The kitchen at the back of the house had a cold concrete floor, and was unheated, except when the gas cooker or the boiler for washing clothes were in use. It was entered from the rear through a porch with a coal cellar on one side, and a lavatory on the other, where no-one lingered in winter. Upstairs were three bedrooms and a bathroom with a cast-iron bath on claw feet for a total scrub once a week, geyser permitting. At first I shared the second front bedroom with Harry, my elder brother; but once Peter, my younger brother, was old enough to move in with me, Harry slept on his own in the small third bedroom above the back garden. Harry had privacy, but missed out on pillow-fights, and on the secret hiding-places for prized odds and ends, or for the peelings and wrappings of fruit or sweets smuggled into bed. The knobs on the main stanchions supporting the old brass bedstead where we slept could be unscrewed, to reveal a hollow space inside them that stored our treasures.

The window of this bedroom overlooked fields across the narrow street at the front of the house and we freely played in the street and the fields. A horse-drawn milk-float passed daily, the milkman stopping to dip a measure into a large churn to dole out milk to customers. The weekly greengrocer’s cart paused for minutes at a time, while women gathered to study his vegetables and fruit. A baker delivered bread daily, and another familiar sight was the coalman, less black than the chimney-sweep, but grimy after delivering his sacks of coal to every house. The horse-droppings were good for manure, and there was some competition in the street between neighbours to shovel it into a bucket for use in the garden.

Across the street the Jesson fields extended, converted by imagination as desired into the wild west, the jungle, sites of battles, and other dangerous exotic places. The expanse of grass and slopes had been created out of what must have been an industrial waste site, and part of the area was used to graze sheep. Immediately opposite the house a low grassy bank, boggy in wet weather, rose perhaps six feet and leveled to a flat space marked out for ball-games according to season. If I looked to the left, south, I could see a fairly steep bank rising up along one side of the flat fields, and I knew this levelled out again at the top, and broke off at grey, muddy cliffs; probably the whole bank had been a slag-heap from a worked-out coal mine, for a number were still active in the region, though none nearby. I could also see the steep slope formed where this bank abutted on to our street, a slope covered with gorse bushes, providing a wilderness of thorny passages for boys in the locality to crawl through and chase, tag, or pretend to shoot one another.

Always I think of boys: girls could get on with their hopscotch on the pavements, and other such forms of play, but adventure was for boys. From my upstairs window I had a view extending beyond the low rise where the fields began, the flat surface stretching away to the high wall enclosing Oakwood House with its park in the distance. To the right, half a mile away, a line of houses marked the boundary to the north. It seems now as if the sun shone all through the summer, while winter dazzled with frost and snow. On long summer evenings it was hard to resist the pleasure of watching from my bedroom activities outside late in the evening, people walking dogs, or just messing about. With other boys—almost never girls—we also played games on the fields, and for a time I fancied myself a good catcher of a cricket ball, until one evening I tried too hard to grasp a high ball falling out of the sun. Blinded by the light I missed it, and it crashed on my nose, which luckily didn’t break. I was humiliated by the pain, the seemingly endless flow of blood, and the mockery of others, but, like other mishaps of this kind, it was soon forgotten, except by me. Mostly we relied on Dad’s home-made contraptions for our pleasures. When it snowed in winter we worked out way down the bank on old orange-boxes or whatever would do office as a sled. Similar boxes, attached to the frame and wheels of an old pram, served as speed runners, which we pulled up the gently sloping street so that we could roll down the hill in them, or tow one another along.

Although our bedroom was unheated in winter, it was tempting sometimes then to steal from under the piled blankets and comforter tucked in by my mother in order to stare out when something unusual is happening. On one such winter night I stood by the window for a long time, my brother Peter in bed and asleep, watching snowflakes fall so gently it seems they may never reach the ground. It was a still night, and the orb of pale light round the gas-burning street lamp that stood near the house seemed there to illuminate flakes that came out of nowhere and lingered in the light as if reluctant to lose their identity in the undistinguished mass on the street surface below. The silence was intense, as the snow piled up, and no-one passed by, so that the light gave life to the snowflakes, which appeared to spin or dance, I suppose in the heat-waves produced by the lamp, enjoying their freedom as long as they were in its halo. The only life in the chill world outside the window lay in the motions of the flakes in their orb of light; beyond it darkness thickened into oblivion. I had an overpowering and melancholy yet in some way pleasurable sense of loneliness, as if a wonderful show were being staged for me so that I could screen off the black void outside.

Home was also where we took parents for granted. My mother, or Mum as we usually called her, had grown up in the tropical heat of India, and felt her children were under perpetual threat from the cold winds that could make the midland plateau where we lived bleak. She took care to protect us by making us wear, through the winter, and indeed for most of the year, woolen vests with short sleeves under our shirts. If only because of our ceaseless activity these vests rapidly turned brown under the armpits, and made familiar the rank smell of sweat, especially when the vest was pulled off for the weekly bath. No wonder Mum seemed always to be dabbing herself with cologne, and hanging lavender sachets to freshen clothes. She was fastidious about cleanliness, as far as conditions would allow, scouring our hands, faces, necks, and behind the ears especially, every day with a rough flannel, torturing the grime of the industrial midlands out of us. We were her chief preoccupation, since she took it for granted that as a married woman she would not have a job, but would be responsible for the home and family. At the same time, she cared for herself, sought to look her best, never went out without powdering her nose, and spent hours buffing her fingernails, which had never developed properly.

Six days a week Dad rode off to work on his bicycle, returning for a cooked mid-day meal and a quiet read or nap before cycling off again, except on Saturdays, when he had the afternoon off. For a long time I had little idea what his work as a sanitary inspector involved, or where he went almost every day. What parents did in the evenings remained a mystery too, and it was much later on that I took notice of the small collection of books he had acquired when he attended evening classes on literature for several years during my boyhood. He annotated some volumes, and read carefully the anthology of Renaissance tragedies in the World’s Classics edition, mulling over the gloomy plays of Webster, I suppose while we were getting ready for bed. He painted, too, in water colours, from a large and splendid wooden box of paints; one or two of his small pictures, a seascape and a picture of Bruges, copied from reproductions I suppose, hung in gold frames on the walls of the living room. I have no recollection of how and when he did such things; rather to us he was the dog-lover who took our lurcher Bill, named after him, out every evening for a romp on the fields, and who whistled beautifully to recall the dog, which, rather like his children, obeyed him much of the time, but by no means always.

3   

Neighbours

Our house is semi-detached, and linked to Miss Barclay’s on the north side. To the south a gap of a few yards separates ours from another pair of houses of the same kind, but built to a slightly different plan. In the first of these live Harry and Maud White, who have no children of their own, and make a great fuss of me and my two brothers, Harry, two years older than me, and Peter, sixteen months younger. Their house fascinates because their style of life is so puzzlingly different from ours. I toddle round to Maud’s back door, to be admitted to her cold, rather bleak kitchen, with its concrete floor and stone sink, which generally seems empty after our own. Everything is tidied away, and there are no smells of cooking, though she makes her husband a rice pudding every day on her gas ring. Small, thin, ginger-haired, she appears to live mainly on tea and biscuits, and always has something sweet for children. Through the kitchen lies the living-room, with a large window facing the street, and a smaller one overlooking the garden, just as in our own home, but it has a quite different atmosphere, and a different smell, as if it might be a foreign country. The room is crowded with heavy furniture of a solid, substantial build; besides a dining table and chairs, and a roll-top desk, a grand sideboard supporting an ornate mirror stands against one wall, facing across the room to the fireplace. A large portrait of Disraeli hangs on one wall. At the rear, against the window looking into the garden, stands Harry White’s pride, a grand old-fashioned gramophone in a carved cabinet mounted on four curved legs. The doors at the front, ornamented with fret-work that somewhat resemble a lyre, open on to a cavern of delights in the form of a stack of records, and the dark oak top can be lifted to reveal a turntable with its box of steel needles that have to be changed frequently. It is set going by hand, and we all take turns at winding up the motor, so that we can listen to favourite music, especially excerpts from the D’Oyley Carte company’s performances of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. It is some time before I tire of A wandering minstrel I and Three little girls from school are we, however worn the records might be. This exotic gramophone is among the best of toys.

Harry is an insurance salesman at a time when many people in our relatively poor neighbourhood pay their threepences or sixpences weekly to cover funeral, medical, or other expenses, to save for Christmas, to buy life insurance, or deal with other contingencies. The insurance man is an important figure, and Harry White always dresses the part, in black jacket and striped grey trousers, grey waistcoat, white shirt, black tie, black bowler hat, highly polished shoes, and grey spats neatly encircling his ankles. He has a permanent stoop, and a long, narrow, mournful face that somehow combines benevolence with sternness; his appearance may have been affected by his harsh experience in the first World War, when he served as a machine gunner in the Durham Light Infantry, and was sent to Salonika. His costume is no doubt carefully planned in relation to his clients. He walks his daily round, usually armed with an umbrella, perhaps to ward off unruly dogs, and looks magnificent to us children. His lifestyle at home hardly suggests much of an income, for, like us, he is living in a council house and paying rent to the local authority, and his only extravagance seems to be the outfit he establishes for his role, one that suggests a cross between a banker and an undertaker. Whether he happened on it, deliberately calculated it, or was required to wear such a costume by the company that employed him, I do not know, but no doubt it both frightens and reassures his clients, frightening them by hinting at their mortality, and reassuring them by confirming that here is a man thoroughly authoritative and reliable, able to advise, console and admonish as need be. The spats are the special touch, having three buttons on each side and a little strap that fastens under the instep. They symbolize an old-fashioned gentleman, on whose dignified person an absolute trust could be built. In this uniform he appears mysterious and rather grand.

During the week Harry trudges the streets calling on clients to collect their threepenny subscriptions, and we see little of him. At week-ends he becomes another person; dressed in old clothes, with no collar on his shirt, his sleeves rolled up, he occupies himself with the garden he loves. The front garden defeats him; maybe there is too much clinker from old pit workings in his soil, for he labours in vain year in and year out to create as the centrepiece of it a small lawn, a green spot for passers-by to admire. He lavishes endless care on it, and works it over with seed, sand, fertilizers, and weed-killers, raking and watering, and pushing a heavy iron roller over it, trying a new variation every year, but the lawn stubbornly refuses to co-operate, and is more often yellow with sand, black with compost, or white with some new fertilizer, than it is green. Our own lawn next door fares much better with little attention.

Maud and Harry have a larger garden at the back of the house, and there they successfully grow masses of flowers, in the ground, in pots, everywhere, best of all sweet peas on a frame, and a great variety of roses. In summer I like to escape into this scented wilderness, where Maud allows us to help, and rescues us from the bushes if we fall among them or get scratched as we negotiate